ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the aim of analysis centres much more on the process of coming to know-that is, knowledge as function and process-than on knowledge as the accumulation of facts. The chapter describes the tension most relevant is that between the reconstruction of history and the reconstruction of the inner world. Freud travelled a long way from the belief that neurosis could be cured by informing the patient about a hidden repressed memory to the recognition of the centrality of psychic reality and of the transference. There is in the development of Freud's theory of technique, a trajectory from uncovering infantile memories as facts of the past, to reconstruction of those memories from the transference, to the viewing the task as the reconstructing not of historical reality, but of a different reality-psychic reality. The Kleinian school is by means unified in its attitude to psychoanalytic technique, and this is particularly the case in relation to the role of historical reconstruction in analysis.
